The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit that concluded in Bishkek on September 1 revealed a simple truth. Amid the weakening of U.S.-led alliances wrecked by President Donald Trump’s policies, America’s arch-rival China presides over a vast network of regional organizations like the SCO—but Beijing can’t turn these loose groupings into anything even remotely as powerful and disciplined as Washington-led alliances (at least before Trump 2.0).

This is a design feature, not a flaw of organizations like the SCO. Despite China being the most powerful member, Beijing is not and cannot be a true team captain because the appeal to other countries, even far less powerful ones like the Central Asian states, is precisely the looseness of the SCO framework and their ability to navigate it without making too many commitments or limiting their ability to maneuver an increasingly challenging international environment.

It’s hardly surprising that SCO heads of state summits have attracted increased international attention in recent years. The SCO is the first among several organizations that China has established over the last quarter century and in which Beijing plays a leading role as the most powerful member-state. The SCO also brings together the leaders of countries that are waging or participating in either kinetic or hybrid conflicts with the West that have been the main drivers of change in the international landscape in the 2020s—including Russia and Iran.

This time around, as the SCO turned twenty-five, the summit took place in Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia: a region that for the first time since 9/11 and the ensuing U.S.-led war against the Taliban has once again found itself in the spotlight amid the global critical minerals rush.

Although the official declaration of the SCO states that it is “not a military-political bloc and is not directed against other states and international organizations,” many in the West tend to be skeptical. The SCO is often compared to NATO, with observers warning that it could become the foundation for a new, anti-democratic world order. The fact that its core members, China and Russia, are embroiled in a confrontation with the West and clearly see the bloc as part of their foreign policy strategy to make the global order “fairer” for non-Western states ostensibly supports assertions of the SCO’s anti-Westernism.

Additionally, the SCO has institutionally spoken up for a more inclusive global order. This topic is a recurrent motif in SCO summit declarations, and the Bishkek summit was no exception. Collectively, the organization occupies a quarter of the world’s landmass, represents almost half of the global population, accounts for a third of global GDP, and comprises $650 billion in military budgets.

Yet despite its sprawling footprint, none of the SCO’s member states, observers, or dialogue partners has received any real-life support from the organization on security issues that can be described as existential to them.

Take Russia, for example. Five years into President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine, it is clear that Moscow’s bet on the organization as a beacon of anti-Westernism has failed. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, it might have seemed logical to expect that the SCO would serve as a non-Western counterweight upon which the Kremlin could rely. Four summits later, that united SCO front in support of Russia’s aggression does not exist. Moreover, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi used the Bishkek summit as an opportunity to reprimand Putin in public and, diplomatically yet directly, call on him to end the war.

That is normal modus operandi for the SCO. There have been numerous previous cases when the organization simply refrained from commenting on current conflicts involving its members, from the bloody 2021 border clashes between its members Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to numerous escalations on the China-India and India-Pakistan borders.

The organization sometimes even actively pushes back against attempts by any of its members to drag the SCO into its own conflict. This happens to Moscow every time it starts yet another conflict on its borders. For example, in 2008, then president Dmitry Medvedev failed to get support on the matter of South Ossetia’s and Abkhazia’s independence; in 2014, Russia’s call for fellow SCO members to recognize Crimea as part of Russia went unheeded; and in 2022, half a year into the war in Ukraine, Uzbekistan’s SCO summit hosts rejected Russia’s statements about the organization’s fight against the West.

This year’s jubilee summit was no exception. There were zero official statements from the organization regarding the war in Ukraine, and only a very vague expression of “deep concern over developments in the Middle East and around Iran” in this year’s declaration—along with formal condolences to Tehran on the death of ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other leaders of the Islamic Republic.

Why isn’t this giant organization front and center of the geopolitical order in Eurasia? The reason is partly historical. The core operating mechanism of the SCO has never been mutual defense against external states. The organization was driven first by the need to delimit contested borders and create confidence among the initial five member-states (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan) after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Gradually, the role of the SCO started to grow as a form of mutual protection against internal threats. The organization is anchored by a shared commitment to fighting what it calls the “three evils”: terrorism, separatism, and extremism. In practice, the SCO provides a diplomatic safe space where authoritarian leaders receive unconditional acceptance of their legitimacy, as well as guarantees of non-interference in each other’s domestic affairs.

The organization cannot act as an alliance because of its deliberate structural paralysis. Expanding the bloc to include rivals like India and Pakistan—originally driven by mutual balancing between Moscow and Beijing—has created a permanent institutional deadlock. India and China share an unresolved border and face occasional military tensions; India and Pakistan have a deeply adversarial relationship; and Afghanistan and Pakistan are engaged in cross-border conflict. By inviting rival powers into the club, the SCO ensures that no single country, even one as geopolitically daunting as Russia, can hijack or weaponize it as a private geopolitical tool.

This structural friction actively serves the interests of the region’s middle powers. Central Asian member states protect their multivector foreign policies and resist confrontation between some SCO members and the West. For nations like Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, the SCO is one of the available tools in this balancing act. They can simultaneously secure Chinese infrastructure investments, buy Russian energy, and cooperate with Türkiye on security issues, among other things—all while getting closer to Washington and Brussels. Joining the SCO requires zero exclusive loyalty, which is precisely what makes it so attractive to its growing number of members.

The reason for the SCO’s deliberate inaction reveals something important about the current world order. Some observers have compared that order to the Cold War period, but it is not the same. The global system is not consolidating into two neat ideological camps around Washington and Beijing; it is fracturing. With the growth in points of friction between the great powers, organizations like the SCO will continue to play a role in the strategic adaptation of the smaller powers caught between them. In this sense, for countries like the Central Asian states, the SCO’s non-binding nature is a valuable asset.